Booker Prize longlist announced

And there are some notable omissions...good for the judges! I've never liked Michael Ondaatje much anyway.

Darkmans by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate)
Self Help by Edward Docx (Picador)
The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng (Myrmidon)
The Gathering by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape)
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton)
The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies (Sceptre)
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (John Murray)
Gifted by Nikita Lalwani (Viking)
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)
What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn (Tindal Street)
Consolation by Michael Redhill (William Heinemann)
Animal's People by Indra Sinha (Simon & Schuster)
Winnie & Wolf by A N Wilson (Hutchinson)

More info here and commentary here. And seriously, 13% of submissions were set in World War II? People, the trend has passed. Ali Smith's The Accidental (on 2005's shortlist) comments brilliantly on the self-indulgence of the genre--a protagonist of the novel is the author of a best-selling, critically acclaimed series of "autobiotruefictinterviews," fictional question-and-answer sessions with real people who died in the Second World War but are interviewed as if they'd lived. Blech.